Saturday, 22 January 2011

The Klimt party dress and reinventing the wheel

For some time I've been thinking about doing a garment inspired by Klimt's The Kiss. The trouble was, how to recreate those beautiful patterns he used. I dithered over using fabric paints but decided (I think correctly) that I'd just run out of talent. And then I realised that the beautiful little symbolic flowers he used so often could be rendered in crochet motifs. So I started hooking..

Twenty motifs in, and during a brief vacation from the virus that's been dogging me since early December, I started thinking about joining them. I had an idea that I could do it in a laissez-faire free-form way to build them up into a bodice. I used Ottobre's sundress pattern from 02/2002 as the block for the bodice. Once I'd twigged that the easiest way to shape the fabric as I was building it was to pin it to the bodice lining, it worked out great.

I kept to the Ottobre pattern for the back - I love that lace up detail. This is a dress that will fit Laura for quite some time!

Now this post was going to be along the lines of 'ta-dah! look at my wonderful new invention: FREE-FORM CROCHET!!!! And then I googled free-form crochet (kind of patent checking, you know?) and discovered that it's actually been around since the 1970s when it was invented by James Walters and Sylvia Cosh. Go figure! Those gits even stole my name for it!!!

Stolen glory aside, here is the finished dress in all its yellowness. It's actually much more yellow in real life (no, honestly, it really is.)

I'm already planning the next - maybe a nod to Monet? If I'm going to skank from fine art, I might as well skank from the best....